Block specific user agents and referrers from being tracked

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The following code allows you to block specific user agents or referrers from being tracked with the Tracking add-on. It was written for a very specific use case in mind but can still serve you as a basis to implement your own, custom filter.

add_filter( 'advanced-ads-tracking-do-tracking',  'my_advads_tracking_filter', 10, 3 );
function my_advads_tracking_filter( $status, $ad_id, $table ) {
    
    // possible harmful user agents, can be partial
    $blocked_user_agents = array(
        'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538',
        'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538',
    );
    
    // possible harmful referrers
    $blocked_referrers = array(
        'example.com',
    );
    
    // only check clicks, use 'impressions' for impressions 
    // or remove the condition to check clicks and impressions
    if( $table && strpos( $table, 'clicks' ) ) {
 
        $block_user_agent = false;
        $block_referrer = false;

        // check user agent
        if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) && '' !== $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) {
            $agent = sanitize_text_field(wp_unslash($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']));

            foreach( $blocked_user_agents as $_agent ) {
                // stop after the first matching user agent we found
                if( false !== strpos( $agent, $_agent ) ) {
                    $block_user_agent = true;
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
     
         // check referrer
         if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) && '' !== $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) {
            $referrer = sanitize_text_field(wp_unslash($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']));
         
            foreach( $blocked_referrers as $_referrer ) {
                // stop after the first matching user agent we found
                if( false !== strpos( $referrer, $_referrer ) ) {
                    $block_referrer = true;
                    break;
                }
            }
         }
         
         // only block the click if we found a blocked user agent AND referrer
         if( $block_user_agent && $block_referrer ){
             return false;
         }
    }
    return $status; 
}Code language: PHP (php)

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